faw ion of 
“PHI\SsE. 


rork © I, 
T* Present Missionary 


2 2 Appeal to the Church 


By ROBERT E. SPEER 
Secretary of the Presbyterian 
Board of Foreign Missions 


—e 
ee 


el 
S : 


L| BR AR Yel ae ! of Foreign 


MissToas of the 
Presbyterian Church 


Address Before the General Assembly 
on Foreign Mission Day, by Robert 
E. Speer, Secretary of the Board of 


Foreiga Missions. 


THE PRESENT MISSIONARY 
APPEAL TO THE CHURCH 


It could be wished that the senior Secretary 
of the Board, who will complete this summer 
his seventy-fifth year of life, who has been for 
nearly a generation in the service of the Board, 
and whom none but those who bave been inti- 
mately associated with him can appreciate at a 
tithe of his real value to the Church, were here 
to-day to present the report of the Board to the 
Assembly. Dr. Hilinwood could do it as no one 
else can, and the privilege should have been his 
of laying before the Assembly the record of the 
most prosperous year in the histery of the Board. 
It has been the most prosperous year financially. 
For the second time the receipts of the Board 
have crossed the line of one million dollars. In 
1893 they were $1,014,000. This year, including 
the contributions and pledges toward the pay- 
ment of the mortgage indebtedness on the Pres- 
byterian Building, they have exceeded $1,300,000. 
Omitting the Building account, but including re- 
ceipts upon the field and the income from in- 
vestments applicable to the support of the regu- 
lar work, the receipts have been in round num- 
bers $1,069,000, $111,000 of which was given by 
the Church for Indian Famine Relief, the care of 
orphan children, the China Re-establishment and 

; ) 3 


Martyrs’ Memorial Funds, educational work ia 
the Philippines, and an advance movement in 
Africa. Leaving out of account even these spe- 
cial funds, the receipts for regular work were 
$958,000, as compared with $942,690 ten years 
ago, and $885,749 five years ago, this latter 
amount not including the $92,000 given that year 
through the Reunion Memorial Fund for the ex- 
tinction of past indebtedness. 

If we separate from these contributions the 
gift of the churches directly through their chureh 
offerings, we may still rejoice at the unprece- 
dented prosperity of the year, which brought in 
$357,710 from the churches directly, as compared 
with $846,779 ten years ago, and $347,562 in the 
prosperous year of 1893. 

It would not be fair, however, to suppress 
certain stern facts which are concealed in these 
general statements. The average contribution 
per church member during the year past, in- 
eluding in the calculation all the receipts of the 
Board for the regular work, has been less than 
96 cents, as compared with $1.17 ten years ago, 
and $1 in 1881. The average contribution per 
church member, furthermore, on the basis of the 
church offerings alone, was-~less than 35 cents, 
the smallest average contribution per ehureh 
member in any of the decade years looking back 
from this Assembly since 1861. And yet again, 
while we have given thus three-fifths of a cent 
a week per church member in our church offer- 
ings, and two cents a week, including legacies 
and all contributions of whatsoever sort, for the 
evangelization of the 150,000,000 of people for 


~ 


- 


Whom our Church is responsible, we have speit 
twelve times ag much annually upon our con- 
gregational expenses, not including our gifts to 
the home benevolent Boards. These are facts, 
however, rather for the conscience of the Church 
than for the criticism of the Board, and it would 
be ungracious in this hour to refer to them, if it 
were not uujust to repress them. 

It is pleasanter to call attention to the fact 
thai, whatever the gifts of the Church viewed in 
the light of the Church’s ability, they have in- 
creased sufliciently in actual amount during the 
last three years to enable the Board to increase 
the appropriations for the native work for the en- 
suing fiscal year by 8 per cent over the appro- 
priatious of last year, which in turn represented 
a 6 per cent advance over the appropriations of 
the year before; while these in their turn repre- 
sented a 4 per cent increase over the preceding 
year. 

But not alone has the past year been the most 
prosperous year financially. It has been the 
most fruitful year in the history of the Board in 
Spiritual resuits. We report this year the largest 
number of converts ever connected with the 
Foreign Missions of our Church, a number equiv- 
alent to the church membership of the large 
Synod of lowa or of Indiana, to the combined 
membership of the Synods of Baltimore and 
California, or of Missouri and Mississippi. Or—I 
know not how otherwise to represent the splen- 
did advancement of the work than by such a 
comparison as this—we have now connected 
with our Foreign Mission churches a’ member- 

6 


ship as large as the entire Presbyterian popula- 
tion of the States and Territories of Washington, 
Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North and South Da- 
kota, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, In- 
dian Territory, Okiahoma, Texas aud Tennessee, 
At the beginning of this new century the mem- 
bership of our toreign Mission churches is equal 
to that of the entire Presbyterian Church in the 
United States in the year 1800. 

It is even more encouraging to note the per- 
centage of increase during the last ten years. 
The two Synods which lead all the Synods of 
the Church in the proportion of their growth dur- 
ing the decade are the foreign Mission Syuods - 
of India and China; the former baviog increased 
196 per cent and the latter 147 per cent, the 
only other Synod which has increased by more 
than i100 per cent being the Synod of New Mex- 
ico. Tbe rate of iuerease of the Synod of India 
during the last decade has been two and one-half 
times that of the Synods of Washington and 
Oregon, seven times that of Penusylvania, vine 
and oue-balf times that of New York, and twenty 
times the rate of increase in the Synod of Ken- 
tucky. If it is said ihat these Foreign Mission 
Synods are new, and that the basis of calculation 
ig small, I pass by the sharp rejoinder that it is 
possibie to make, and ask you to think of the 
obstacles against which this success has been 
achieved, Innumerabie intiuences work with 
the Christian minister in this land; the whisper 
of the mother’s voice to the heart of her child; 
the memory of the touch of the mother’s band 
brought back after the long passage of years; the 

6 


. 


eountless suggestions of Christ’s truth that stir- 
round us on eyery hand; the subtle constraints 
of Christian institutions; these are a few of a 
multitude of influences supporting the appeal of 
the preacher and creating dispositions favorable 
to Christian faith. There is nothing of this in 
the mission field. Hvery influence sets in antag- 
onism to Christianity. We wrest our triumphs 
from heathenism one by one, against the 1n- 
herited incubus of centuries of superstitions, 
against the certainty of social ostracism and po- 
litical hostility, against the difficulties of mak- 
ing the truth known to people whose languages 
eontain no words for its expression and whose 
hearts have almost lost the capacity of response, 
against the assurance of persecution and often 


. the threat of death. The men who are doing the 


work of which these 42.000 converts in our mis- 
sion churches are the fruit have never iost faith 
in miracle, because they have seen it daily be- 
fore their eyes. 

And the splendid spiritual results of the work 
stand out in yet more vivid magnitude, if you 
look back, as we may fitly do this morning, 
over the whole history of our Woreign Mis- 
sion enterprise. We have added to our churches 
during these years a number equal to the 
Presbyterian population of the Synods of Ne- 
braska, Kansas, Baltimore and Minnesota, or 
of Illinois and Missouri; or twice the Presby- 
terian population of the great State of Iowa; 
while we have sent out during these years at 
least 2,079 missionaries, and have given to the 
work nearly $27,500,000. 

Hi 


Yut f ask you to come back from all this, #6 
the thought of the souls who have been won this 
last year. We report, I believe, the largest num- 
ber of additions to our churches ever made in one 
year. Think for a moment of the BEtah District 
in the Furrukhabad Mission, with a population 
greater than that of the State of Connecticut, 
equal to the combined population of Montana, 
Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Idaho 
and Utah, or four times the population of the city 
of Detroit. We have one missionary among these 
820,000 people. Yet by God’s blessing this one 
man baptized last year more converts than were 
received in ten of the great Synods of our Church. 
Or think of the young Mission in Korea, I re 
member when Dr. Underwood was here seven 
years ago. Speaking of the results already ob- 
tained, he declared with a blazing enthusiasm 
which I almost felt was extreme, that we were 
standing on the threshold of one of the greatest. 
missionary successes in the history of our 
church. The event has more than justified his 
faith. Mr. Swallen, who is here in this Assembly 
from Korea, said night before last that when he 
went to Korea, eight years ago, there were only 
100 Protestant Christians in the entire country; 
that now there are at least 8,000, with multi- 
tudes more favorably disposed to the truth and 
waiting only for further instruction. The huge 
Mission church built in Pyeng Yang, which is 
designed to seat ultimately at least 1,800 people, 
is already packed to the doors and overflowing; 
and one of our missionaries wrote of going en & 
snowy winter night to the prayer meeting in the 

g 


| @harch, expecting to find but a few there, and 
. finding assembled a great congregation of 1,000. 


In the Korea Mission alone, during the past year, 


_ there have been more baptisms than in the Synod 
_ of California or the Synod of Baltimore. 


And I ask you, my friends, to stop for a mo- 


| ment to think of what the Gospel means to each 
of these who this past year have come as little 


children to their Father’s arms. “Old man,” 


said one of the missionaries to an outcast in 
Southern India, seeking admission to the church, 
“do you want to be baptized, and take the Lord’s 
Supper?’ “Like gold,’ said the old man. And 
like gold, yea, more precious even than fine gold, 


. has been the treasure brought to more than 
_ four thousand hearts and homes during the year 


that has closed. In a land like this multitudes 
of men who have never accepted the grace of 
God in Christ yet rejoice in the enjoyment of 


/ all those accessory blessings which flow in a 


tide of good from the Christian Church wherever 
it goes. These poor souls abroad have never 


| tasted of these blessings. The Gospel has been 


to them the unfolding of a new life. It has 
brought them its gifts subsidiary and direct. It 


. has struck off from them the shackles of their 
_ superstitions. It has unsealed a thousand founts 


of which they never dreamed, from which the 
streams now flow. It has touched the life of 
little children with a sense of love. It has 
taught the hard heart to be kind with the ten- 
derness of Christ. If he is dear to your heart 
this morning, if you count his face fair and his 
love the one thing in life, then you know of the 
Phe 9 


Misdness which this hour is fliing these thoi: 
sands of hearts, and of the gratitude with which 
they turn to-day to those through whom there 
came to them the tidings of the Heavenly 
Father's love. 

And not alone in these ways has this been a 
plessed year, but it needs to be said further that 
there never has been a year when our Missions 
have contributed as they have this past year to 
the sweep and onset of those divine forces that 
are lodged of God in the enterprise of Missions. 
It is this aspect of the missionary movement that 
has fixed the attention of the whole world dur- 
ing this year. Men begin to perceive its un-— 
conquerable and unresting power. And Missions 
have not shrunk from such scrutiny. Nor haye 
they paused to wait for its issue. They have 
gone steadily forward, and never more in all 
their history than during the year that has 
passed, sunk deep in human life throughout the 
world the transforming forces of the life of God. 
They have shown us during the year as never 
before the power that resides in great ideas to 
upheave and remould the most stagnant and 
lethargic peoples. They have driven us one step 
nearer to a radical transformation of all our 
theories of ethnic psychology. They have shown, 
as they have taught “those great and sweeping 
thoughts that overspread all others, and conduct 
the world at last to freedom,” that the forces 
that resist Missions fight against the great tides 
of God. They have compelled the nations of the 
West to recognize the universality and binding 
obligation of the missionary principle, and to de- 

10 


fend their political aggressions, which one hun- 
dred years ago they would have made without 
eoncern for the concealment of selfish purpose, 
by the protestation of missionary motive. And 
in specific ways we have seen during the past 
year the missionary enterprise at work in these 
broad redemptions. We have watched it with 
bread in its hands feeding the hungry in India, 
and with pity in its heart opening the doors of 
the brothel prisons of Japan and setting their 
captive inmates free. And never in all the his- 
tory of Missions has that great Book which 
smites injustice and uplifts the weak wherever 
it goes been poured over the world in such a 
flood. Our own presses have sent out during the 
year more than 100,000,000 pages of the Bible 
and of books that make it intelligible to men. 
Nor has there ever been a year when the world 
Was as open to receive it. The situation in Japan 
has been but an illustration of the situation 
everywhere. Eighteen years ago the Agent of 
the American Bible Society went, in the harbor 
of Uraga, to one of the Japanese men-of-war 
lying at anchor there, and in response to his re- 
quest was denied permission either to go on 
board himself, or to send on board a single leaf 
of the Christian Scriptures. Last year the Bible 
Society sold more Scriptures in Japan than in 
any previous year, and two of the largest battle 
ships in the Japanese navy were under com- 
mand of Christian officers, one of whom was an 
Admiral, while the late Admiral Serata, trusted 
and respected by all, was President of the Young 
Men’e Christian Association in Tokyo, an elder 
; ul 


in one of our Presbyterian churches, and a zeal- 
ous worker for Christ until the day of his death. 
Set immovably firm in the divine will, the forces 
of Missions have moved this past year, as they 
will move until the end is won, resistlessly on to 
the great goals of God. 

And in one other great regard the year has 
been a year of notable movement. The last 
General Assembly declared its conviction that it 
was not the object of the missionary movement 
to perpetuate on the foreign field the denomina- 
tional distinctions of Christendom, and encour- 
aged the Missions of our own Church to dimin- 
ish the significance of differentials, and to seize 
every opportunity for larger unity. Perhaps 
we scarcely expected our answer 80 sharp and 
soon. Hardly had the echoes of the last As- 
sembly died away before a Conference of all 
the Protestant missionaries of Japan assembled. 
in Tokyo, adopted the following resolution and 
appointed a promoting committee to propose — 
practical measures. 

“This Conference of Missionaries assembled 
in the city of Tokyo proclaims its belief that 
all those who are one with Christ by faith are 
one body; and it calls upon all who love the 
Lord Jesus and His Church in sincerity and 
truth to pray and labor for the full realization 
of such corporate oneness as the Master himself 
prayed for on the night in which He was be- 
trayed.” 

The Presbyteries of Mexico are represented 
before this Assembly with a request for an- 
therity to establish in Mexico an independent 

13 


anion Synod, our own churches uniting with 
the fruits of the work of our brethren of the 
Southern Presbyterian Church, and perhaps also 
of the Cumberland and the Associate Presby- 
terian Churches. And the last meeting of the 
Presbyterian Alliance in India voted at once 
to prepare for an organic union of the fourteen 
Presbyterian bodies in India into a national 
Presbyterian Church, which will begin its life 
with five Synods, twenty-five Presbyteries, and 
fifty thousand church members. We are caught, 
we may be sure, in the swing of a divine pur- 
pose in this matter. “I hold,’ declared Principal 
Rainy, the embodiment of the union of the 
United and Free Churches of Scotland, speaking 
at a joint meeting of the Congregational and 
Baptist Unions in London, last month, “TI hold 
the grand unity of the Church of Christ in 
Christ and by its relation to Him. At the same 
time I do very strongly hold that people who 
needlessly keep outwardly separate from one 
another, and unfold competing banners before 
the world, are seriously misrepresenting the 
Ohurch of Christ to the world.” Our unity of 
purpose abroad seems likely to give us that unity 
of heart at home in which our Lord may find the 
promise of the fulfilment of His prayer. 

And how solemnly God has been teaching us 
this past year that whether we will be one in 
service or not, we shall at least be one in suffer- 
ing. In common with all of the Churches of 
Christ we have been called to mourn above our 
dead. Let me repeat again the roll of those 
whe have passed out from us inte the glories 

18 


of the City whose Builder and Maker is God:— 
Dr. John C. Lowrie, who passed away in the 
ninety-second year of his age, after sixty-seven 
years of connection with the Board of Foreign 
Missions as missionary and secretary, who saw 
the Church membership grow from 233,000 to 
more than 1,007,000, and its offerings to the 
Board of Foreign Missions from $1,777 to more 
than one million dollars. If I live to be as old 
as Dr. Lowrie, and the same proportion of in- 
crease is preserved, I shall see the Presbyterian 
Church contributing to the evangelization of 
the world the annual sum of six hundred 
millions of dollars. And now, after serving his 
own and two more generations by the will of 
God, he has gone on, as it was his desire, in the 
quaint language of his own day, “to obtain the 
perfect image of God, to know more of the 
existence of God as Father, Son and Holy 
Ghost, to see without a glass the exceeding love 
displayed on the Cross, to observe the stations, 
orders and employments of angels, to know how 
saints are employed in relation to this and to 
other worlds, to see how God overrules sin, and 
why it is through great tribulation that He brings 
His children to glory, in a word, to see God in 
all His attributes and His angels and saints in all 
their glory.” Dr. Divie Bethune McCartee, who 
went out to China in 1843, the last survivor save 
Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn of the little company that 
laid the foundations of the Missions of our 
Church in Eastern Asia, before the days even of 
the Arrow War, and who, whether as missionary, 
diplomatist or teacher, healing the sick, laying 

16 dt: r 


the foundations of education in Japan, or aiding 
the governments of China and Japan in the early 
years of their political relations with the West, 
sought always first the Kingdom of God and His 
righteousness. Edson A. Lowe, true knight of 
God, who died after eight years of service, in the 
most sagacious and devoted attempt yet made to 
evangelize the great city of Santiago. Dr. Mary 
Brown, who like her Master, “went about doing 
good.” Mrs. J. P. Graham, of the Western India 
Mission, losing her life in a sad accident. Mr. 
and Mrs, Gifford, of Korea, dying within a few 
weeks of one another, Mr. Gifford absent in the 
country itinerating at the time, and carried, as 
his black lovers carried the heartless body of Dr. 
Livingstone from Ilala down to the coast and on 
to its last resting place in the Abbey, by the 
native Christians who bore him from village to 
village, each village furnishing its own devoted 
carriers. Sweet and pleasant were they in their 
lives and in their death they were not divided. 
And Dr. Maltbie Davenport Babcock, a disciple 
whom Jesus loved, for one year a member of the 
Board. 


os 


e golden evening brightens in the west, 

on, soon to faithful warriors comes the rest, 
Sweet is the calm of Paradise, the blest, 

Alleluia |!” 

Yet how small seems our sorrow when we 
think of all the unrelieved shadows that have 
tested elsewhere! These have but gone on to 
See the King in His beauty, and their last days 
have been filled with ministries of love; And 
they have not wanted any good thing. How 
15 


terrible, as over against the sympatky and tie 
service which they receive, stands the gloom 
of the famine sufferers of India! Think of that 
vast area of 225,000 square miles affected by it, 
62,000,000 of people feeling its pangs; hundreds 
of thousands dying from starvation alone, and 
hundreds of thousands more from the diseases 
which weakened bodies were not able to with- 
stand, You who have stood helpless before hu- 
man suffering and looked down upon the agony 
which it would have been easier to bear than to 
behold, can appreciate in some faint measure the 
weary anguish of the men and wonien in the 
Western India Mission. Now it was great crowds 
of five or six thousand persons clamoring for re- 
lief at the doors of the missionary’s house. Now 
it was an old man lying down by the road to die. 
“What was the trouble with this old man?’ 
asked the missionary when the end had come. 
“Nothing, Sahib,” said a friend; “he was only 
weary.” Now it was a poor mother, bearing — 
the body of ber dead babe under her scanty rags, 
because she had no place to lay it away. Now 
It was the piteous ery of little children, with 
limbs too fragile almost to bear their wasted 
bodies to the missionary’s home. I hardly know 
which to pity more—those who have thus suf- 
fered for a little while and then been released 
by the calm touch of death, or those who have 
had to look on all this suffering, and live in the 
midst of it, sharing the capacity for pity of Him 
who had compassion upon the multitudes. 

And yet out of all this suffering and death a 
great and glorious harvest has arisen. Super- 

16 


stitious peopie have laid aside their fears as they 
have watched the missionary minister to the 
needy and wash the foul sores of the diseased. 
“These are not the works of one that has a 
devil,” they have said. And already in two of 
the churches of the Western India Mission there 
have been more baptisms than there were con- 
verts heretofore connected with all the churches 
of the Mission as the result of the work of more 
than forty years. At Kodoli, two communion 
services were necessary to enable the mission- 
aries to welcome to the church the hundreds who 
clamored to come in. “So glad a day,” wrote 
Miss Brown, “never came into my years before. 
They came in groups of twelve and fifteen, and 
took the solemn life-long vows. It was impos- 
sible to keep back the tears as we listened to the 
strong voices of the men with all the conviction 
of their souls, promising to keep the Sabbath, 
give up their idols, and worship the one ‘Upper 
God.’’’ The service began in the afternoon, and 
the sun went down, and the moon arose, and still 
group after group filed through, and in reverent 
silence confessed their Saviour. And the shining 
stars looked down upon the largest assembly of 
native Christians ever gathered in the bounds of 
the Western India Mission field. It will always 
be so! first the torn soil, and the seed buried in 
the gloom, then the up-springing grain and the 
abounding harvest. 

It is only because of this unwavering confi- 
dence in my heart that I can speak as I must 
of the past year’s history of our Missions in 
China. It has been a year, speaking in the 

ly 


ianguage that men ase, of irretrievable loss. 
Before the Boxer uprising occurred we had 
twenty-two established stations in China. At 
the height of the troubles the missionaries were 
compelled to flee from all but six of these, and 
when the storm burst three of our stations 
were wiped out. The buildings at Wei Hien 
were looted and burned. The missionaries 
escaped into the night and hid in the fields 
while the glare of their burning homes lit the 
sky and the savage cry rang in their ears, ‘““The 
devils are escaping, kill; the devils are escaping, 
kill!’ In Peking and Paotingfu every building 
was burned or torn down, the foundation stones 
were dug up, and the wells filled level with the 
ground. But the loss of property was a trivial 
thing. There went out from us in the flames of 
Mr. Simcox’s burning dwelling at Paotingfu a 
little company in comparison with whose loss 
the destruction of every dollar’s worth of mis- 
sion property throughout the Chinese empire | 
would have been an insigniticant thing. How 
they fell that day you know, praying as their 
Master prayed, for those who killed them, and 
who knew not what it was they did. These 
were the first martyrs of our Church, save the 
strange deaths of Mr. Janvier and Mr. Loewen- 
thal, since the massacre of the little company 
from Fatehgarh on the parade ground of Cawn- 
pore, on the early morning of June 13, 1857. Now 
to that martyr roll we must add the names of 
these:—Dr. George Yardley Taylor, the Rev. 
Frank E. Simeox and Mrs. Simcox, and Dr. Cort- 
Jandt Van Rensselaer Hodge and Mrs. Hodge, 
18 


and the three little children of Mr. and Mrs. 
Simcox. 

I can understand it all except the death of 
these little children. Calvary we comprehend; 
but whatif Christ had been slain as a little child 
in Herod’s massacre! I cannot forget these 
little children; the two of Mr. Campbell shot at 
Cawnpore, one in its father’s arms, and the 
other laying its tired little head on the shoulder 
of an Englishman who died with them, and 
these three little ones at Paotingfu; and I have 
no heart ‘but to be still about it all, as there rises 
up that scene which the Chinese reported as the 
last thing they saw—Mr. Simecox holding his 
little boys by either hand, and walking up and 
down behind the flames, 

“These through fiery trials trod, 
And from great affliction came; 
Now before the throne of God 
Sealed with His Almighty name, 
Clad in raiment pure ard white, 
Victor palms within their hands, 
Thro’ their dear Kedeemer’s might, 
More than conquerors they stand.” 

What has been our finite loss has been their 
infinite gain. 

And yet the gain has not been wholly theirs. 
We, too, have gained what good Thomas Fuller 
called ‘“‘the rich inheritance of their memory.” 
We have gained the example of their fidelity 
and of the faithfulness unto death of the mul- 
titudes of native Christians who have gone home 
by flame and sword and suffering, rather than 
prove recreant to Christ. There was Dr. Lewis’ 
cook, Kichin, who was summoned toe recant, and 

of] 


who thought upon his wife and three helpless 
children without a bread winner, and who then 
thought upon Christ, and was calm, and bowed 
his head to the executioner without fear. There 
was the Rey. Ting Li Mai, pastor of the church 
at Laichowfu, who was thrown into the foul 
jail, and beaten two hundred blows with the 
bamboo on the naked thighs until the flesh lay 
like jelly upon the bones. There was the old 
reacher in Shantung, who was offered the al- 
ternative of worshipping idols or death, and who 
abode steadfast as a rock, whose ears were first 
cut off, and then his head, while his body was 
offered in sacrifice. There was an old woman, 
summoned before the magistrate and bidden to 
recant, who, when she refused, was beaten upon 
her lips, but whose crushed and mangled lips 
still murmured confession of Christ. There 
were the two little children in the village near 
Paotingfu, who looked up fearlessly at the over- — 
hanging edge of the Boxer’s sword, and refused 
to deny that they were the little children of the 
Christian’s God. We have gained from all these 
lives irrefutable evidence that the work which 
we have done has been the work of God; and 
we have been shown afresh that “there is power, 
power, wonder working power, in the precious 
blood of the Lamb.” We have gained beside 
this a challenge to like fidelity and a summons to 
new love, and a motive that can never die nor de- 
eay. Over the soil that martyrs’ blood has hal- 
lowed, Jesus Christ shall reign. 

But, my friends, it would be disingenuous to 
coneea! the fact that there are otker thingsr that 

20 


we have gained. There has come down upon the 
missionary enterprise an avalanche of unsparing 
criticism, some of it venomous and malignant; 
some of it merely ungenerous and ignorant. I 
should be tempted to pass it by if I did not know 
that there were some here whose confidence in 
missions had been shaken by it. We are told that 
the missionary did wrong before the troubles, and 
that he has done wrong since. He is charged 
with having been responsible for the uprising, 
with being an ill-educated man, taking no pains 
to inform himself as to the prejudices and con- 
ceptions of the people, recklessly trampling upon 
their superstitions and their innocent fancies, in- 
terfering with their courts and corrupting their 
administration of justice, bearing himself as a 
boor and preaching sectarianism. JY answer that 
criticism by a question and an assertion—Who? 
I know better! And surely it is a matter of tes- 
timony. Let witnesses be heard, and witnesses 
who know; not witnesses of rotten life of which 
the very presence of the missionary is uncom- 
promising condemnation; not witnesses at third 
hand whose knowledge of missions is mediated to 
them over wine cups or in steamer saloons. The 
Governor of Shantung is competent to testify. 
“You, Reverend Sirs,” he says in a letter to our 
missionaries encouraging their return to their 
stations, “have been preaching in China many 
years,and, without exception, have exhorted men 
concerning righteousness. Your Church customs 
are strict and correct. In establishing your cus- 
toms you have been careful to see that Chinese 
law has heen observed. How then ean tt be said 

b 


that there is disloyalty?’ And I hold here in my 
hand an open letter to the British public, 
written from Hong Kong by the brother-in-law 
of His Excellency, Minister Wu. Surely he is 
competent to testify. “You have been told,” 
he says, “both officially and privately, that the 
whole affair was directly or {indirectly occa- 
sioned by foreign missionaries and their con- 
verts. This is absolutely false. Your mission- 
aries, if left to themselves, will make many 
more friends than enemies in China. I wish to 
disabuse your mind of some of the ridiculous 
charges made against your missionaries. They 
have been charged with having committed 
acts of indiscretion inasmuch as they frequent- 
ly preached against the ancient beliefs of the 
Chinese; as, for instance, ancestral worship. 
And by such indiscreet acts they have been stir- 
ring up the wrath of the Celestials against them. 
I beg leave to tell you that this is not a fact. 
The missionaries have been charged with the 
indiscretion of making no separation of the sexes — 
in their places of worship. This is a frivolous 
charge. The Chinese, both men and women, 
often mix together in worshipping at some of 
their temples. It is alleged that they have from 
time to time interfered in the litigations, and 
with the dispensation of justice. I cannot re- 
call of having heard that in a single case this 
charge has been substantiated and brought home 
to the offenders.” And then speaking in regard 
of the critics of missions in Christian lands, this 
Chinese voice declares:—“It is easy, of course, to 
make criticisms, eapscially when tke accuses 
Fa 


Wises te find scile excise for his hatred of the 
accused; but the public want absolute and tang- 
ible proof before they will give their credence 
and judgment.” 

But the critics allege not alone that the mis- 
sionary was the vexatious and irritating cause of 
the troubles, but also that he has been violent 
and bloodthirsty in his demands for their sup- 
pression aud for vengeance; that he has violated 
the eighth commandment and been foremost in 
looting the property of the pecple whom he was 
sent to save. Well, once again, Who? “Dr. 
Ament,” it is replied. Well, I have no brief to 
defend Dr. Ament, but I do not believe there is 
a just man in this Assembly who, placed in Dr. 
Ament’s situation, with widows and fatherless 
children dependent upon him, whose protectors 
and possessions had been taken from them by 
evil, wicked men, would not have done substan- 
tially what Dr. Ament did. But he and those to 
whom he is responsible are competent to defend 
him. I am speaking in behalf of our own mis- 
sionaries. Who? I challenge you to present or 
support a single charge of this character against 
our missionaries. If in the stress of absolute 
poverty at the close of the siege they took food 
and clothes they stand ready, or we stand ready 
for them, to make proper compensation to the 
owners. We are told that we ought not to 
separate our missionaries from others; that they 
are all involved in one common difficulty. I re- 
ply that the only way to clear up this difficulty 
is to analyze it and demand proofs. What have 
our missionaries done? If it is said that the 

28 


matter will blow over it we drop it, that criti- 
cism will be silenced, I answer that to silence 
no criticism and to conciliate no antagonism will 
we traduce or allow to: be traduced the mis- 
sionaries of our Church, 


And after all, what an astonishing somersault 
the enemies of missions have made in this mat- 
ter. A few years ago the missionary was a 
harmless, impotent and foolish enthusiast, who 
was accomplishing nothing. Now we are told 
that he was pestilentially effective, and that he 
succeeded in upbeaving and overturning 
400,000,000 of people. A few years ago we were 
told that he was ignorant of the practices of the 
people to whom he went, and refused to adapt 
himself to them. Now he falls in line with the 
views of the people and pursues their accepted 
principles in the reimbursement of outraged and 
ruined native Christians, and he is criticised for 
abandoning the moral standard of Christendom. 
Blow hot, blow cold, you cannot please the devil. 
And in very truth he is the father of a vast deal 
of this vicious and ignorant criticism of mis- 
sions. They coustitute too open an affront to 
him and the spirit which he begets. “As for out- 
siders,’’ says Captain Mahan, in a personal letter 
from which I venture to quote, “while I would 
not undervalue their enmity, it is to be expected. 
He that is not for Christ will be against him— 
a pitiful condition, but inevitable. Calling the 
master of the house Beelzebub much more will 
he call those of the household. Nothing more 
demonstrates the agency of a personal devil than 


2% 


the attitude of the non-Christiai: toward mis- 
sions.” 

We have gained as another outcome of the 
year the astounding proposition that missions 
are an outlawed and illegitimate enterprise, and 
that the missionary has no legal rights. An 
American who goes to Asia is an American still, 
unless, perchance, he should happen to be a 
Christian. The American harlot may set up her 
brothel, as she has done, In Shanghai and Han- 
kow, and the Stars and Stripes may wave over 
her pollution. The American saloon keeper may 
take refnge under its folds and sell his wares 
in every open port in China. But the missionary, 
although the treaties speak specifically of him, 
and the Chinese have accorded him many rights, 
Is on this new theory a man without a country. 
The enterprise with which he is connected is 
an enterprise of expatriation, and he himself 
Is an alien, a political pariah. His fathers, and 
he himself, may have fought for the land that 
disowns him and for the flag which is denied 
him. He himself may still be paying taxes for the 
support of the government, and may be allowed 
to vote when he returns to his own land. But 
simply because he is a Christian, a conscientious 
Christian, a @hristian who believes that Chris- 
tianity 1s too good to be misappropriated by any 
one land to its own uses, he is to be denational- 
ized. If he will abandon his Christianity and 
take a Chinese mistress and go into the liquor 
business he can claim the full protection of an 
American citizen. No more infamous doctrine 


25 


was ever preached. It makes every drop of one’s 
blood hot with indignation. Men are to be free to 
pour the vices of Christendom over the world. 
Christendom will recognize them as its legiti- 
mate representatives. But the men who strive 
to stem this foul tide, who try to give the world 
those eternal principles from which Christian 
civilization, human purity and national right- 
eousness proceed, are to be sent out without 
passports, but with the proclamation, “These 
men may be treated as you please. We disown 
them. Kill them. Burn their houses. Outrage 
their wives. Torture their children. What do 
weeare? They have no rights.” 

My friends, there are two questions involved 
in this matter. One is, What are our rights? 
And I assert that an American does not forfeit 
his rights by being a Christian; that a mission- 
ary is entitled to all that the treaties guarantee 
him, and that he is entitled to demand that his 
government shall procure for him in its treaties 
no less privileges than it obtains for his fellow 
citizens. “I ama Roman citizen,” said Paul, the 
Christian. It is puerile to contend that Paul’s 
assertion of his political rights within the bounds 
of his government does not justify our assertion 
of our political rights under our government 
wherever in this broad world we may go. The 
other question is, What shall we do with our 
right? And I answer, Whatever is best for 
the cause of Christ. He surrendered His right 
to be on an equality with God. And whenever 
for the sake of Christ and His cause it is best for 


36 


us to decline political protection and to accept 
death, to waive indemnity and to submit to loss, 
we must do so in the spirit of Christ. Oniy, we 
will do it in the spirit in which Christ laid down 
His life. These are our rights; we have power 
to lay them down, and we have power to take 
them again. a 
Alas! what is far worse than all elise, we have 
gained as a consequence of the sad experiences 
of this last year a spirit of faint heartedness in 
the Church. ‘Those dear faces that have faded 
away in the fiames at Paotingfu glide back into 
our memories. And we think of what it costs. 
Let no one speak bitterly of those who feel that 
the cost is too great. And yet, my friends, there 
has been no waste; there can be no waste of 
life in the service of Christ. As the mother of 
one of those who died at Paotire!n writes of her 
daughter:—‘‘The bitterest pa’: of our trial was 
the faithless reproaches of fellow Christians be- 
cause of what they called the waste of such 
valuable lives. My soul was literally torn wiih 
anguish by such words. ‘They seemed to re- 
flect such dishonor on our Lord, and my con- 
stant prayer is that he may vindicate Himself 
to His servants, so that no one can doubt that 
all has been according to His wise purpose.” 
This is what life is given to men for. ‘This was 
what Christ did with His life. He laid it down. 
“Long, long centuries ago, 

One walked the earth 

His life a seeming failure; 

Dying, He gave the world a gift 

That will outlast the centuries.” 


a7 


“Wacept a grain of wheat faii into the ground 
and die,” He said, “it abideth alone; but if it 
die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” We were not 
given our lives to keep them, but to lose them. 
Instead of finding in the terrible cost of China’s 
redemption ground for now turning back, wiil 
you not remember that a dearer life than any 
of these even was spent for us nineteen hun- 
dred years ago? Oh, my friends, this spirit of 
timidity will not be the spirit of our Church. 
These who die would have died in vain, then. I 
think they would needs rise up out of their 
graves to plead with us to take up and not turn 
from the work that they laid down. They 
would be the first to offer their lives again if 
they were here. It was one of the little com- 
pany who passed through the tortures of last 
suimmer’s siege in Peking who made the first 
contribution to the Martyrs’ Memorial Fund, de- 
signed to replace those who have passed on. 
You cannot think of those graves ouiside the 
walis of Paotingfu and propose to turn back. 
It seems to me that I can hear their voices this - 
morning protesting against this wrong. Even 
in the bitter hour of death, no such thought 
crossed their hearts. ‘Tell his mother,’ was 
one of Mr. Pitkin’s last messages, “to teach our 
little boy about China, and when he is twenty- 
five years old, to let him come back as a niis- 
sionary.” 

Every letter that has come to us from the 
Missions in China since these troubles broke 
has been a letter of confidence and of hope; ap- 


28 


- peal after appeal cailing for men, men, men. 
“We have a field of fifteen millions of people,” 
says one of the last letters from the Missions 
in Shantung. ‘They will be accessible now as 
never before. Can you not send us men?” That 
is the voice, I will not say of the world, but of 
God, from every field of our Church. What will 
you say in reply to it? The Missions are like 
greyhounds straining at the leash. Why will 
you not let them go? ‘They are like dammed 
waters chafing to be free. Why will you not 
let them flow? We stand on the threshold of a 
new century. Backward is no word for this 
time. Forward is the only word for this day. 
Why will you not speak it? They ask you to do 
it from Korea, which we can evangelize if we 
will in the next twenty years. They ask you 
to do it from Mexico. Hear the call of the two 
men who are our only missionaries among the 
half million people of Guerrero, aud who de- 
clare that the only need is workers to gather in 
the multitudes. They ask you to do it from 
Persia, and I do not see how you can resist their 
appeal, the appeai from the little companies of 
men and women there and in Syria, whom we 
have set down before Mohammedanism. Kor 
twelve hundred years now the prophet has in- 
sulted the King. For twelve hundred years 
Islam has trampled upon the Cross of Christ, 
‘and put Him to an open shame. And tow at 
last her political power is crumbling away. 
Heresy after heresy has shaken the foundations. 
The touch of life has released the frozen clutch 


of the dead man’s hand, and the hour of otf 6p ~ 
portunity has come. Can you not hear its sum- 
mons? Not a call for men ouly or for moiuey, 
nor for these at all primarily; but for a Dew 
birth of spiritual purpose, the will of a nobler 
obedience. Neither resolutions nor tears will be 
sufficient answer to this appeal. It calls for 4 
living habit of devotion and a passion for re- 
demption as intense as Ciirisi’s. 

And 1 do not know how God cap find a way to 
reach our hearts if we cannot understand the 
visible meanings of the day in which we live, 
and the visions that rise before our eyes. I see 
that poor Chilian abused for his apostasy, ac- 
cepting reproach with patience, and replying to 
those who reviled him for having changed his 
faith:—“Yes, it is true, I cannot deny that. But 
that is not the point. The point is that at last I 
have found a faith that has changed me.” Let 
that poor man stand as representative of the 
fifty millions of people to the south of us, laid - 
at our very door, awaiting a faith with power to 
change. I see a mosque in a far off town iu 
northeast Persia, on the Mohammedan Sabbath, 
with a missionary sitting at the Moliah’s invita- 
tion in the Moliah’s place and preaching to the 
multitude of men, of temperance and righteous- 
ness and the judgment to come, and of the God 
of love and life over all! And I see the crowded 
Mission chapel in Teheran, at the time of the ser- 
vice in memory of Queen Victoria’s death, with 
the Shab’s personal body-guard sent for the first 
time away from his presence, and accompanied 
by the Prime Minister, the late Shah’s brother, 

80 


the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of 
War and scores of Mohammedan princes and 
nobles listening to Christian men singing “Rock 
of Ages,” and to the words of Christ, “I am the 
resurrection and the life.” ULet that mosque and 
chapel with the throngs that filled them stand as 
representative to-day of 180,000,000 of Moham- 
medans, by whom Christ has been annulled, and 
among whom Christ shall surely be enthroned. I 
see those two little famine children of whom 
you may read in the Report of the Board, stand- 
ing in awe-struck wonder by their dead in a little 
booth near Panhala, and saying, in answer to 
the missionary’s kindly question, “Father is 
sleeping, and mother is sleeping, and they wil! 
not wake for us out of their sleep.” Wet them, 
and the voices of the hundreds of children gath-— 
ered by the missionaries in the famine districts, 
represent to your hearts this morning the more | 
than 200,000,000 of little children in the world 
who by our lethargy and neglect have never felt 
the tender tonch or heard the loving speech of 
Mary’s little Child, who is saying to us to-day, as 
He said to other disciples of His long ago, “Suffer 
the little children and forbid them not to come 
unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” 
And then there rises up before my eyes again a 
compound beyond the north gate at Paotingfu, 
and I see a father walking to and fro behind the 
flames, holding a little lad by either hand. And 
lo, another seems to be walking with them, and 
his form is that of the Son of Man, and all these 
other visions of the needy and the forgotten and 
the lost fade Inte Him whe gave his life fer a 


world of men; and I hear Him saying, “I am the 
Son of God. I must work the works of Him that 
sent me while it is day, for the night is coming. 
I go forth upon my way. Who will come after 
me?’ O friends, let us arise and go after Him. 
Let us answer His cry with one voice. Cannot 
some one speak the word that will lead the 
whole Church to rise up in her strength and say 
to Him, “Here am I, Lord. Send me!” 


